James Gray and the Collapse of “the Middle” in Cinema

My most anticipated film of 2013, along with Sofia Coppola’s “The Bling Ring” and Jean-Luc Godard’s “Farewell to Language,” is James Gray’s latest, the title of which recently reverted to its original one, “Lowlife.” He recently spoke about it and other matters cinematic with Jessica Kiang in Has Hollywood Murdered the Movies?,” to which I responded), but Gray addresses it from a conjoined practical and aesthetic context that presents what I think is a crucial mode of contemporary cinema—one that Gray resists, though not necessarily in the way that he thinks he does. In the interview, he speaks of

the troubling disappearance of “the middle.” Which is not to say the middlebrow—that exists with flying colors. But there is tremendously interesting cinema being made that is very small, and there are very huge movies which have visually astounding material in them, but you know Truffaut said that great cinema was part truth, part spectacle, so what’s really missing is that. It’s what United Artists would have made in 1978 or something.

Like “Raging Bull” could not be a low-budget movie, it just couldn’t, there’s a certain scale that’s involved in making it, and no one would make “Raging Bull” today. The last example of the industry doing this middle movie that I’m talking about, to me would be Michael Mann’s film “The Insider” which I really like. That has scale and also a bit of truth it. What I don’t see as part of the discourse is a discussion on the economic forces that have forced out the middle. There is some discussion, some awareness, but not enough, because to me that is the central crisis of American movies: the disappearing middle of the mainstream.

I’ve long felt that one of the reasons for the ambient nostalgia for classic Hollywood movies—not merely the long-overdue recognition that the studios harbored and, at times, even fostered the work of great artists but the prevalent critical fascination with all that emerges from the high-studio era—is the sense of scale. Movies that dealt with large historical events were filmed in a way that matched: huge landscapes, massive sets, hordes of extras, vigorous action, and, overall, a behind-the-scenes opulence that suggested a collective exertion at the level of the heroic deeds being depicted. It often came at a price higher than the one marked in studio ledgers—namely, the emphasis on production over direction, the constraints placed by the vastness of investment on individual artistic vision.

At a certain point—somewhere, I’d say, in the nineteen-sixties—the sense of scale fell apart. A movie such as John Ford’s “Cheyenne Autumn” (his last Western, from 1964) filmed the West in its grandeur and kept a sense of proportion—a balance of means and results. By contrast, in the late seventies, two great movies of sublime scale, “Apocalypse Now” and “Heaven’s Gate,” lost that balance. The first proved colossally costly, the second, ruinously so—and though both filmmakers had a vision on the size of the events they filmed, both films proved to be, in a way, terminal. For director Michael Cimino, the failure of “Heaven’s Gate” (due precisely to critical repudiation of the film due not just to a blinkered indifference to its brazen originality but in knee-jerk response to reports of its budget and its extraordinarily exacting production), was a crushing experience. Coppola spoke of the enormity of the experience (“We had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we went insane”). After seeing Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s “Our Hitler” (which Coppola distributed in the U.S. in late 1979 and 1980), a vast intellectual historical epic which is filmed on a soundstage and makes remarkable use of rear-screen projection, Coppola turned to technology for his own next large-scale project, adapting those techniques for the romantic comedy “One from the Heart” and using effects to conjure a sense of grandeur when, with analog filmmaking, it no longer seemed possible. Coppola saw where the problem lay: there’s plenty of grand-scale, visionary filmmaking being realized, mainly in the digital realm. The gigantism of plein-air adventure is now the product of C.G.I., in such movies as “The Avengers” and “Prometheus.”

The problem is still there, more conspicuously than ever. Take “The Master,” a great movie that has received neither the critical appreciation nor the box-office success it deserves. I think that its disproportion of scale—which its director, Paul Thomas Anderson, turns into one of its most important and most audacious aesthetic aspects—is one of the main reasons for its crabbed reception. The story is a big one; it covers a long span of time, a long geographical stretch, and (by implication) a major modern American movement as well as a crucial and resonant theme in American history. Yet Anderson approaches it intimately, as a clash of two mighty characters, who, for all of their metaphorical power, are still just two guys who are filmed, for the most part, as two guys wrangling face to face and hand to hand. It makes for an extraordinary movie—but it defies the expectations of critics and viewers alike.

On the other hand, whatever motives of financing may have inhibited the movie’s scope, and whatever other practicalities may reduce its scale, the question isn’t just one of money and studios but of psychology, not just one of production but also one of distribution. Disproportion in scale is the very definition of modernity, starting with Hamlet as the bounded king of infinite space and continuing to Cartesian imagination, Joycean consciousness, Freudian unconsciousness, and the atomic and intergalactic (and for that matter microbiological and prehistoric) realms defined by science. In the sixties, such movies as “Red Desert” and “Playtime” captured this strange feeling. For that matter, the nuclear drama of “Kiss Me Deadly,” from 1955, with its quest for the tiny “great whatsit,” suggests not just the ambient menace of catastrophe but the oddness of its arising from infinitesimal causes. And, today, where “The Master” is an internalized epic on an intimate scale, “Moonrise Kingdom” is an epic of geographical and Biblical proportions that, with its sense of off-kilter scale in the foreground, arrives at its grandeur with comedy and irony.

The movie that may have been made in the mighty landscape with a cast of thousands has long been available on TV and now can be flipped through like a book on a screen even smaller than a paperback. For that matter, the cinema itself, from the start, has been a peculiar microcosm: it may seem crazy to watch a movie on an iPod—but the viewed image is close to the size of the negative on which it was recorded. The history of cinema is that of a tiny maw that opens to swallow the world.

Modern psychology, with its seemingly infinite involuted spirals and tangles, is the counterpart to the cinema’s embrace of the wide world. “The Master” doesn’t expand to show the full spectrum of its settings, it contracts to condense them in the white-hot inner lives of its furious protagonists. And that’s a crucial aspect of James Gray’s movies as well: he talks about “telling a story” (“cinema, for me, the meaning of it is telling a story on film”), which, he thinks, has largely been lost, and he frames the problem in classical artistic terms:

It’s not just movies, it’s culture-wide. Look at music, the idea of melody. I would say over the last 30 years melody is not really particularly important. Isn’t that analogous to story?

Gray is a good storyteller and a great director, largely because, for all that he thinks he’s telling a story, he’s doing lots of other things at the same time. He says, for instance, that the “swell of the architecture of a movie is part of what makes it the most beautiful visual art form,” and—whether he chooses to talk about it or not—he’s a master of psychological extravagance, an intrepid spelunker in the abysses of inner worlds. There are ways of using melody that play like mere throwbacks and ways of using melody that (as in works by Stravinsky) are as progressive as its repudiation. But it isn’t necessarily the filmmaker who will tell us so. Joaquin Phoenix, in Gray’s last film, “Two Lovers,” delivers one of the great modern performances: his stolid mask of pain seems to shatter cubistically into antic masks of self-mocking and self-loathing self-revelation in scene after scene. Phoenix is one of the greatest of modern actors—but Gray has much to do with the revelation of Phoenix’s art, and that’s another reason why I’m impatient to see the new film they’ve made.

“Lowlife” is a historical story, set in New York in the nineteen-twenties; the problem of scale is built into its very premise, and I’m eager to see how Gray—who is one of the deepest modern cinematic realists for being so much more than a realist—approaches it.

Photograph: Wikimedia Commons.

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